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Episode 73

Agentic AI and the future of home-based care: Predictions for 2025 with Adrian Schauer

Adrian Schauer: 

This is a step change in technology on the order of mobility or the cloud, or social networks. This is really going to change everything. Now the hype cycle, like I said, it thinks things that are going to happen within the next three months are probably going to take a year to happen, but we cannot sleep on this trend. A year to happen, but we cannot sleep on this trend. The providers that figure out how to run their business better with AI are going to take this game. As they say, AI is not coming for your job, but the person using AI is coming for your job. So I feel the same way about running a home care agency.

Erin Vallier: 

Welcome to another episode of the Home Health 360 podcast, where we speak to home based care professionals from around the globe. I’m your host, , and today I am joined by the founder and CEO of AlayaCare himself, Adrian Schauer. Welcome to the show.

Adrian Schauer: 

Great to be here. Thank you very much.

Erin Vallier: 

I know I’m super excited to be the one having this conversation with you this year because your predictions podcasts for the upcoming year have always been the most viewed and most downloaded episodes of our podcast, so I know that people really do appreciate what you have to say and they’re super excited to hear what you’re thinking about in the new year.

Adrian Schauer: 

Great. One of my highlights of the year is sitting down and figuring out where I think the industry is going, where technology is going, and so I like to do the new predictions. I also enjoy looking back at last year’s predictions and seeing just where I got it right, and so I like to do the new predictions. I also enjoy looking back at last year’s predictions and seeing just where I got it right and where I got it wrong.

Erin Vallier: 

Ooh, do you have any thoughts about that before we get into the next year?

Adrian Schauer: 

There’s a general trend where I think I’m right, but often too early, and in the predictions game, being too early is pretty indistinguishable from being wrong. I always think things are going to move faster than they end up moving.

Erin Vallier: 

Yeah, fair enough, we overestimate what we could do in a year and underestimate what we can do in a decade, right? So I know I got to take a quick peek of your predictions for the new year. I know we’re going to be talking about some AI, some streamlining of workflows, caregiver well-being, optimizing your workforce, combining technology with empathy and not losing that human touch, and getting prepared. So we’ve got a lot of stuff to cover. I’m just going to dive in with some really pointed questions. If you’re good with that, perfect, let’s do it In 2025,. You have said that agentic AI is going to revolutionize home care by proactively identifying and acting on care opportunities. Before I ask the question, I know that some of our listeners don’t really know what agentic AI is. Can you define that term for us? And then I’d love to know what you envision these advancements, how they’re going to transform the caregiver and client relationship and overall care quality.

Adrian Schauer: 

Yeah, 100%, All right. Probably the best way to answer the question what is an agentic workflow? Is to compare it to. How is it different than a regular workflow automation? We’re at this cusp of history where AI is absolutely changing the way work is done, and the key aspect of that is that the AI can now make decisions and communicate more like a human would.

Adrian Schauer: 

A workflow automation in the traditional sense was any stream of things that need to be done that can be expressed in some flavor of an if-then statement is a candidate for automation. Now, why is so much of the back office within a home care agency not automated? Well, it’s mostly because, in the attempt to automate something like taking an intake or handling a call off, you hit points where it’s not a straightforward if then else type decision, and sometimes you hit points where I actually need to interact with some stakeholder in this workflow with natural language to be able to fully accomplish the workflow. And so, because traditionally we had those obstacles, the things that were a candidate for automation was maybe 5, 10, 15% of the work that’s done at the home care agency. Now, the reason 2025, I think, is going to be different is because of this unbelievable advent of large language models, the chat GPTs of the world right and the tools we have at our disposal as software providers to get over some of those instances.

Adrian Schauer: 

And so I’m going to take a very specific example. Right, let’s say a caregiver calls in sick. They’re not going to be at work for the next week, so what is triggered on that basis? So typically a coordinator takes the request. Then they have to go in. All of the visits that that care worker was going to do this week have to be set to vacant.

Adrian Schauer: 

And now the real work starts. How do I meet those care needs? How do I find the right care workers who could pick up those visits? Oh and, by the way, maybe I’m going to need to make a few shifts of the existing schedule, or maybe I’m going to have to shift someone else’s schedule to be able to insert those visits into a different care worker’s day. And so you look at how one could actually execute that and you can imagine an almost impossible task to do with the traditional automation.

Adrian Schauer: 

An almost impossible task to do with the traditional automation. But if you have a workflow engine that can make some fuzzy decisions, oh, if I saw Mr Smith at 9am, I can slip this one in at 10. And then by 11, I can still be across town to see Mrs Lopez. Okay, that’s the first decision that can be made, but then you might actually need to communicate to Mr Smith and Mrs Lopez. The care worker will still be there, but then you might actually need to communicate to Mr Smith and Mrs Lopez that your care worker will still be there, but maybe an hour later, etc. Etc.

Adrian Schauer: 

This is what I’m really excited about is we now at AlayaCare are building tools within our software that can talk to all of the API endpoints within the software and then can also communicate out via secure messaging to the care worker, to the family or the client and make all these type of shifts. And so you can see that in the scheduling use case I talked about, but you can imagine it just as well in handling an intake and even in revenue cycle, whether it’s approving visits or doing that kind of back and forth negotiation that might have to happen if I need an auth to be extended for whatever reason. So a lot of potential.

Erin Vallier: 

So really leveraging AI as your own personal assistant to get the work done. I love it. So let’s move on to this concept of the flywheel. So in your predictions you introduced the home care flywheel that emphasizes small, continuous improvements across workflows. Can you share some specific examples of how this approach might deliver compounded benefits to agencies over time?

Adrian Schauer: 

Yeah, 100%. And one thing I’d emphasize is that these benefits stack up across domains. So every home care agency or owner is interested in controlling back office costs, but they’re also interested in having a great experience for their care workers and they’re also interested in having great outcomes from the care that’s delivered, and so that’s why we talk about a flywheel. If you can be incrementally more efficient in how you schedule, for example, you can get your care workers all the hours they want in routes that make sense within their day, that respect their preferences, so you have happier care workers. If you do that, you have less turnover means you can have better continuity of care for the patients you’re serving or the clients you’re serving, and then you can have better patient outcomes. And these little improvements compound exactly as you say, and 1% better every day, it can add up. It can definitely add up.

Erin Vallier: 

I love that concept, something that I’ve adopted myself just 1% better. It’s something that I’ve adopted myself just 1% better. So imagine, over the course of a year or a decade, what that really means for your business and your person if you adopt that for yourself. Now let’s talk about workforce optimization and caregiver well-being, because, as we know, there’s a caregiver shortage. I think Home Health Care News said something we’re going to need a million care workers by 2040, and we’re already almost a half a million in a deficit. That’s not going to change. So what steps can the agency take to prioritize employees, their experience with the company, so that their organizations become more attractive to good workers and keep them at?

Adrian Schauer: 

the company. There are two aspects I want to emphasize there. The first is around caregiver empowerment, and I’ll use a very specific example where Layla that’s AlayaCare’s in-app chatbot can make a massive difference. When you show up at a client’s home maybe it’s a new client, maybe it’s someone you haven’t seen in a week and it’s a highly volatile situation with the health of this patient. To be fully empowered, I want to know, in a summary, everything that’s changed with this patient since I was last there. I want to know what are the main risks for me to be aware of, and I want to be able to do that as I’m on the doorstep, ringing the doorbell, without having to read through a week of visit history and pull out the important facts. This is the type of task that AI is extremely good at, and so I can just message Layla, ask her what’s going on with this client and get an immediate summary and then follow up. Maybe there’s a condition I’m not too familiar with and I need some advice on how to deal with it. So, caregiver empowerment that’s number one.

Adrian Schauer: 

Number two, when we talk about making the back office more efficient, yeah, there can be some financial benefits to that, but there can also be real benefits in terms of how human an organization you can run and how value added the time of your support staff can be. Again, if I go back to my initial example, if I’m spending four hours trying to fill a week’s schedule because somebody’s called off, you know what I’m not doing as a supervisor or coordinator. I’m not checking in with my care worker who just finished a visit at a tough client. I’m not asking them how it went. I’m not offering emotional support. I’m not extending them how it went. I’m not offering emotional support. I’m not extending my brand out to the front line where the care is delivered. Between the operational efficiency of AI agents, freeing up people to do the more human part of their work, and the support that the AI itself can give the care workers at the point of care, I think we’re in a great position to help caregiver well-being into 2025 and beyond.

Erin Vallier: 

So what I’m hearing you say is you need to give your employees the tools to make their jobs a lot easier and help them be more effective, and that will make your organization a good place to work. Let’s move on. We’ve got another topic here that we’ve talked a lot about technology AI and I think some people are kind of cautious around that. It’s like we’re going to give all the work to robots and we work in an industry that is very human touch. You’ve got to have that human connection right. So, while technology like Layla offers this efficiency, how can agencies ensure that those innovations just complement rather than replace the human connection? I guess that’s my question.

Adrian Schauer: 

So this is going back a couple of years, but people have been talking about oh, is AI going to come for your job? This has been in the mainstream for a little while now, and I don’t remember the publication, but someone put out a list of the jobs in our economy that are at least risk of disruption from AI, and at the top of the list was home care worker. This is a human profession that requires empathy that the robots and the AIs are not coming for anytime soon. The only aspect they are coming for are the low-value-add parts of the process that your people don’t want to be doing anyway. Okay, the more we can take away those repetitive, low-value tasks and free people up to either deliver care or enable the delivery of that care, the happier everyone is going to be in the ecosystem.

Erin Vallier: 

Yeah, the stuff that makes their employees eye roll. Right? I don’t want to do this. I’d like to double click on this, too, because I think, if we’re looking at the predictions of needing all these care workers, and we’re already at a deficit, ai is not going to replace people. It’s going to enable us to provide more care with less bodies. Right, we’re going to automate those pieces that might take an extra full-time employee or 10 and allow the machine to do that, so that the agency can be more efficient, provide more care to the people that need it without having to add 10 extra full-time employees. Right? Is that what you’re getting at?

Adrian Schauer: 

Right and Aaron, how many home care nurses have approached you and said you know what I like taking care of patients, but what I really like is filling out paperwork.

Erin Vallier: 

Oh my gosh, adrian. I used to be in quality management and I love my nurses, but they do not love documentation. Physical therapists they’re great, they’re like, very objective, they’ll check all the boxes. Nurses they just love, they provide the care and they forget that the chart even exists.

Adrian Schauer: 

And that is the spec for a product. That’s what an EHR should seek to be is out of the way of the care and get everything documented with the least effort.

Erin Vallier: 

Yeah, because if it’s not documented, it’s not done. That’s for my nurses out there. Let’s talk about preparing for this transformation, right? So, as agencies look to embrace all of these trends that you have shared with us today, what practical steps should they take to integrate agentic AI, adopt incremental improvement strategies and foster this workforce-centric culture?

Adrian Schauer: 

I’m on the same journey as the CEO of AlayaCare. I also look across the 60 employees or whatever we have here today and I try and figure out how we can be better at what we do with the tools that are available today that weren’t available a year ago or five years ago. I’ve got two pieces of advice the first is about mindset and the second is about having the infrastructure to realize the benefits. So, on the topic of mindset, I have shifted from thinking about jobs to thinking about the workloads that need to be done in my business. Okay, and I look at something like a marketing function. Here we are, you and I, aaron, we’re doing some marketing for AlayaCare right now, and there are workloads within marketing that can be done by AI. When I create a piece of content and I need the 100-word version, and I need the 500-word version, and I need a picture to go with a thousand word, that is something that can be augmented with a large language model. But when I look at who’s going to creatively come up with the brand that’s going to resonate with people and communicate accurately what it is we do, that’s a human. So there are various workloads that make up the jobs that exist within marketing, and the more I start thinking about our business in terms of the workloads that need to get done, the more I’m able to not get too stuck in job definitions of the past and look to the future and say these workloads, those are candidates for AI and automation, and therefore here are the jobs that need to exist to realize the business value. And so I think that same mindset needs to creep into how we look at the operations of a home care provider.

Adrian Schauer: 

Okay, so that’s number one. Number two is having the infrastructure in place to be able to realize these benefits. This might sound self-serving, but it’s only self-serving because we’ve invested in the AlayaCare offering to be the baseline system of record on which you can implement systems of intelligence and systems of action to get maximum business value. And so I would say, first of all, you have to be on a modern cloud-based piece of software. The various tools you use to do your job have to have open APIs so that you can integrate workflows that might cross different productivity tools you use within your agency.

Adrian Schauer: 

And the third is we’re in an era of an explosion of possibility and way more proofs of concept than realized business value in AI. You even look at the Fortune 500 companies. They all have a bunch of trials going and very few of them have totally transformed their businesses yet around these new tools. Pick your partners, be in a trial mindset, understand you’re going to have to iterate a few times because large language models are good at certain things and on other things they just hallucinate too much and they’re just wrong when you can only tolerate so much of that in different parts of your business. So find a partner, have modern tools, experiment, but then really try and get your transformation done in production.

Erin Vallier: 

Gotcha. So for success, in case the listeners lost you there, what I heard you say is take a moment to figure out what really requires a human touch and what can be automated. Step one, step two if you’re not on a technology, you don’t have technology. That’s step one. Get technology in place right Step zero. But if you have a stack, it might be time to look at upgrading, leveraging some of these newer tools and just enter into it with a mindset of experimentation, because life is one big experiment. You got to apply that in your business. Try something new. If it doesn’t work, try something different and keep working with your partners so that you can get the outcomes that you want. That’s what I heard you say.

Adrian Schauer: 

Well summarized.

Erin Vallier: 

Yeah, that’s really all I had for you in terms of your predictions. I’m just wondering if you have any parting wisdom for the listeners before we send you off to your next meeting or to the plane.

Adrian Schauer: 

I hope everybody is as excited as I am about the potential here. This is a step change in technology on the order of mobility or the cloud or social networks. This is really going to change everything. Now the hype cycle. Like I said, it thinks things that are going to happen within the next three months. They’re probably going to take a year to happen, but we cannot sleep on this trend. The providers that figure out how to run their business better with AI are going to take this game. As they say, AI is not coming for your job, but the person using AI is coming for your job. So I feel the same way about running a home care agency.

Erin Vallier: 

Be an early adopter. In other words, you got it All right. Thank you so much for hopping on the show today, adrian. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation and I’m sure that listeners have enjoyed the wisdom that you have imparted upon them.

Adrian Schauer: 

Thanks, erin, good to be here Home.

Erin Vallier: 

Health 360 is presented by AlayaCare and hosted by Erin Vallier. First, we want to thank our amazing guests and listeners. Second, new episodes air every month, so be sure to subscribe today so you don’t miss an episode. And, last but not least, if you like this episode and want to learn more about all things home-based care, you can explore all of our episodes at alayacare. com/ homehealth360 or visit us on your favorite podcast platform.

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Home Health 360 - Episode 73

Episode Description

In this episode, Adrian Schauer, CEO and co-founder of AlayaCare, shares his top predictions for 2025 and discusses the major trends and developments that will shape the future of home-based care. Chief among these predictions is the rise of agentic AI and how this transformative technology will empower caregivers to deliver smarter, more proactive care. Adrian explains how AI agents will go beyond simple automation to serve as decision-making partners providing real-time insights, personalized care plans, and streamlined workflows that alleviate administrative burdens and improve patient outcomes.

Additionally, Adrian discusses other key predictions, including how small, continuous improvements across workflows will act as a flywheel that generates exponential impacts for both operational efficiency and care quality. Adrian also emphasizes the importance of employee experience as a cornerstone for agency success and how prioritizing caregiver well-being and overall satisfaction will be a distinct competitive advantage in a challenging labor market.

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